In a now-famous TED talk from 2010 the author Simon Sinek explained why some campaigns— whether marketing, social, or political—captivate us and inspire us, and why others fall flat. Feeling like more of a plea for a dollar, a like, or a vote. At the time of posting Apple was flying exceptionally high, off the release of the iPhone in 2007, a new array of sleek, effortless macbooks, the iOS ecosystem was still changing how people interacted with apps, the internet, and the content that a new generation of creators were putting out at a blazing pace.
While ten years ago might seem like a lifetime in the digital age, what is striking about Mr. Sinek’s observations are how well they’ve held even while the landscape has changed drastically in many other ways. The main thrust of his argument, what I’ll call the “What, How, Why” argument, is that flipping the approach most companies make (i.e. focusing on What you make first, telling people How you do what you do, and finally, telling them that those two things are Why you should buy their product) is what makes a campaign great.
That is to say the companies that focus on Why they do what they do first, create the most inspiring campaigns. Sinek calls this embodying your Why. To give an example, Apple believes that: “Everything we do challenges the status quo, we believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers.” As he says, “People don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it.” So the best marketing is not finding people who want to buy what you have, but to believe in why you do what you do.
This powerful idea, that people buy your why and not your what, has led us to find ways that we can properly leverage not necessarily the nuts and bolts reality of our companies, but the mission, the ethos, the spirit of our missions. The question is, what is the best way to do this? How can a company best bear its soul to the world, to show them who they are, to create personal connections and tailored experiences that will engender loyalty, admiration, and excitement among its consumer base. In the age of digital marketing a brand must promote a sleek, cohesive, image across numerous advertising channels. The customer experience must be responsive, secure, and reliable, and at the end of the day it has to be attractive to your consumers, whoever they might be and whatever they might like to see.
Enter Adobe Experience Manager.
What is Adobe Experience Manager?
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a multifaceted content management strategy that is designed to provide industry standard responsiveness, security, and reliability for end-users while simultaneously allowing for innovative, fluid content creation for page authors. AEM is an umbrella term for five distinct standalone products that integrate seamlessly with many of Adobe’s other offerings:
AEM Sites—Allows users to manage digital platforms across devices with intuitive drag and drop capabilities
AEM Assets—Manage video, images, and dynamic media. Integrates with Adobe Creative Cloud. Essentially allows you to easily navigate digital assets and syncs with the Creative Cloud suite automatically so edited material will be reflected on your site without the need to update.
AEM Forms—Allows you to create smart forms which can save a partially completed form for a user in order to pick it up later. This data can also be saved to secure a portal for that user for future visits.
AEM Apps—Allows you to manage mobile apps, updating can happen through dragging and dropping without going through the development process.
AEM Communities—Allows you to create and manage blogs, forums, and reviews. Supports incorporating twitter feeds into sites.
As with most of Adobe’s offerings these tools become more powerful when you integrate their creative cloud and marketing tools. For example, integrating with Creative Cloud allows you to synchronize creative assets directly, updating changes to assets automatically. Adobe analytics and Target allows teams to leverage behavioral and actual data to measure and optimize your site and implement content targeting and create personalized web experiences while tracking conversion rates.
Why Choose Adobe Experience Manager?
When it comes to the question WHY, we would do well to reconsider the idea of embodying your WHY from above. You want a tool that is going to allow you to put your absolute best foot forward at every moment whenever a customer, new or repeat, comes to visit your site and learn about why, how, and what you do. AEM helps developers, webmasters, and content creators collaborate and integrate inspired ideas with one another with ease, allowing the members of teams to deliver content to multiple channels from one unified and centralized platform. AEM brings together the Creative and the Back-end in order to produce industry leading experiences and performance.
When every step of the creation process is simplified and optimized, creators and developers are free to spend more time focusing on the user experience, rather than the back-end maintenance and asset management that generally eats up so much of the limited time and resources a given team has to devote to any given project. It follows here, that as brand images become more cohesive, beautiful, responsive, and secure users will flock. AEM is a tool that allows companies to produce not only websites that are buzzworthy, but an entire marketing campaign, across an almost infinite collection of channels, from digital points of sales, to digital billboards, to mobile phones, tablets and even signs on the subway, all from one input strategy. Site editing and scaling is all done automatically, allowing your teams to work on what’s really important, designing that next campaign that will inspire the world.
On the back-end side AEM benefits from a unique approach marrying the positive aspects of the Traditional monolithic stack CMS and the flexibility and innovation of the Headless CMS that are currently making waves in web development and asset management circles. This hybrid approach allows for the best of both worlds, avoiding the possible issues a headless-only CMS can experience with execution speed in asset management, access control and security, workflow management, publishing, version control, and personalization. While still offering headless-CMS for single page applications, mobile apps, experiences for custom screen sizes, and emerging channels.This speed of execution is hugely important as, according to a Google Study conducted in 2016, 53 percent of mobile users will navigate away from a page if it takes more than thirty seconds to load.
This hybrid approach allows for the flexibility teams need in order to handle the mature, stable channels a business has already built, while also being able to operate with exceptional agility in order to capture and reuse content in new channels.
AEMbody your WHY
Nearly all of the aspects of Adobe Experience Manager have been meticulously designed in order to sell customers a stunning, inspiring experience. Using Adobe Experience Manager and the entire suite of Creative Cloud and Marketing tools have to offer will allow your business to provide reliable, responsive, and secure experiences to your customers. The holistic quality of the experience from back to front that teams produce when using AEM will ensure that your company will have the best possible opportunity to inspire customers to realize that it’s the Why, and not the What that is what sets your company apart.
References:
Simanek Talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4&feature=emb_logo
Adobe Promo Video
https://www.adobe.com/experience-cloud/topics/headless-cms.html#
Headless CMS info
https://medium.com/swlh/what-is-a-cms-39bfdcb7201a
